I agree with the general idea of the article, but there are a few wild takes that kind of discredit it, in my opinion.
“Imagine the calculator app leaking 32GB of RAM, more than older computers had in total” - well yes, the memory leak went on to waste 100% of the machine’s RAM. You can’t leak 32GB of RAM on a 512MB machine. Correct, but hardly mind-bending.
“But VSCodium is even worse, leaking 96GB of RAM” - again, 100% of available RAM. This starts to look like a bad faith effort to throw big numbers around.
“Also this AI ‘panicked’, ‘lied’ and later ‘admitted it had a catastrophic failure’” - no it fucking didn’t, it’s a text prediction model, it cannot panic, lie or admit something, it just tells you what you statistically most want to hear. It’s not like the language model, if left alone, would have sent an email a week later to say it was really sorry for this mistake it made and felt like it had to own it.
32gb swap file or crash. Fair enough point that you want to restart computer anyway even if you have 128gb+ ram. But calculator taking 2 years off of your SSD’s life is not the best.
It’s a bug and of course it needs to be fixed. But the point was that a memory leak leaks memory until it’s out of memory or the process is killed. So saying “It leaked 32GB of memory” is pointless.
It’s like claiming that a puncture on a road bike is especially bad because it leaks 8 bar of pressure instead of the 3 bar of pressure a leak on a mountain bike might leak, when in fact both punctures just leak all the pressure in the tire and in the end you have a bike you can’t use until you fixed the puncture.
Yeah, that’s quite on point. Memory leaks until something throws an out of memory error and crashes.
What makes this really seam like a bad faith argument instead of a simple misunderstanding is this line:
Not used. Not allocated. Leaked.
OOP seems to understand (or at least claims to understand) the difference between allocating (and wasting) memory on purpose and a leak that just fills up all available memory.
I agree with the general idea of the article, but there are a few wild takes that kind of discredit it, in my opinion.
“Imagine the calculator app leaking 32GB of RAM, more than older computers had in total” - well yes, the memory leak went on to waste 100% of the machine’s RAM. You can’t leak 32GB of RAM on a 512MB machine. Correct, but hardly mind-bending.
“But VSCodium is even worse, leaking 96GB of RAM” - again, 100% of available RAM. This starts to look like a bad faith effort to throw big numbers around.
“Also this AI ‘panicked’, ‘lied’ and later ‘admitted it had a catastrophic failure’” - no it fucking didn’t, it’s a text prediction model, it cannot panic, lie or admit something, it just tells you what you statistically most want to hear. It’s not like the language model, if left alone, would have sent an email a week later to say it was really sorry for this mistake it made and felt like it had to own it.
32gb swap file or crash. Fair enough point that you want to restart computer anyway even if you have 128gb+ ram. But calculator taking 2 years off of your SSD’s life is not the best.
It’s a bug and of course it needs to be fixed. But the point was that a memory leak leaks memory until it’s out of memory or the process is killed. So saying “It leaked 32GB of memory” is pointless.
It’s like claiming that a puncture on a road bike is especially bad because it leaks 8 bar of pressure instead of the 3 bar of pressure a leak on a mountain bike might leak, when in fact both punctures just leak all the pressure in the tire and in the end you have a bike you can’t use until you fixed the puncture.
Yeah, that’s quite on point. Memory leaks until something throws an out of memory error and crashes.
What makes this really seam like a bad faith argument instead of a simple misunderstanding is this line:
OOP seems to understand (or at least claims to understand) the difference between allocating (and wasting) memory on purpose and a leak that just fills up all available memory.
So what does he want to say?